Fan Translates Iron Storm Expansion Daisenryaku: Sakusen File into English

A fan has localized into English the Japan-only sequel to Sega Saturn World War II strategy game Iron Storm. Not only that, he made a patch to correct the Working Designs-localized original Iron Storm, too.

The sequel is called “World Advanced Daisenryaku: Sakusen File,” in Japanese. Translation hacker Hemulen calls it “Iron Storm: Operation Files” in the patch uploaded to SegaXtreme today.

He also uploaded the Iron Storm “retranslation” patch to SegaXtreme today. Both patches use the Sega Saturn Patcher.

Sakusen File uses Iron Storm’s engine and assets to add two new campaigns, two new playable armies — the USSR and the UK — and a one- to five-player multiplayer mode with about 30 additional custom maps. It’s somewhat like an expansion pack to Iron Storm.

“It really is an excellent game,” Hemulen said. “Before I started working on Sakusen File, Iron Storm had been essentially 90%+ of all my gaming hours on Saturn for more than a year. Took some time getting into, but then it hooks.”

He included with both patches a translated manual supplement PDF. It provides flowcharts for each country’s land and air unit development as well as flowcharts for the German, American, Japanese, Soviet and colonial campaigns — the original Sakusen File calls the latter the “Cenozoic Campaign” but Hemulen changed it because of the difficulty of localizing it.

“The purpose of this supplement is to translate important assets in the Japanese game manual that was left out when Working Designs translated the manual into English,” he wrote in the supplement. “It contains the [necessary] flowcharts to get an overview of several important aspects of the game. Without them the game experience is incomplete.”

Hemulen entered both patches into the SegaXtreme Saturn 31st Anniversary Homebrew Showcase, calling its deadline useful motivation to wrap up his projects.

“The project has also been a rather wild and exciting adventure,” Hemulen told SHIRO!. “Along the way I have grown a deep appreciation for the thorough work done by others that have enabled me to get this far and have the experience I have had. Without the community tools and the documentation placed on SX, I would never have gotten off the ground.”

He said he was curious about the process of making a translation patch after reading posts on SegaXtreme about others’ experiences. Now he has his own SegaXtreme thread detailing his experiences making a translation patch. (Plus another one for the Iron Storm retranslation patch.)

“I am now realizing that I have essentially written these writeups in the kind of form that I myself would have enjoyed reading them in during that period before I ever gave romhacking a go,” he said.

World Advanced Daisenryaku: Sakusen File was developed and published by Sega in March 1996 about six months after releasing Iron Storm, called “World Advanced Daisenryaku: Koutetsu no Senpuu” in Japan.

But the next game in the series, Daisenryaku Strong Style, was a third-party game developed by the series’ original team at System Soft and published by Oz Club in June 1997. Sega’s Daisenryaku team instead made a similar, competing game called Advanced World War: Sennen Teikoku no Koubou, which Sega published in March 1997.

First-time Saturn hacker

Hemulen began the translation in December 2024 and said it’s his first ROM hacking and localization project. But it wasn’t until September 2025 that he posted a thread to SegaXtreme to reveal his project.

The first two to four months were spent “grasping technical basics,” aided by Malenko’s guide to replacing graphics in Saturn games, Hemulen said.

Hemulen started by transferring over the English script that Working Designs created for Iron Storm when it published that game in North America in May 1996. But he found places where the script could be improved.

“Along the way, I discovered several errors and oversights in the Working Designs translation,” Hemulen said. “This project isn’t a full retranslation, but I’ve made improvements where it made sense.”

Some of those improvements include “questionable” English word choices and misspellings as well as stretched text and cluttered images.

While much of the translation patch involved moving Working Designs’ script over to Sakusen File, Hemulen doesn’t know Japanese, so he used machine translation for other parts of the game.

“All texts and mission descriptions are standard WW2 historical descriptions based on known events, so this is the kind of game where getting by with translation tools is actually feasible,” Hemulen told SHIRO!. “I’m not familiar with Japanese, but that’s also why I chose this specific game to work on. And during working on it, it’s apparent to me why translations of most other genres of games are completely dependent on skilled translators.”

It wasn’t just Working Designs’ work that Hemulen felt needed to be touched up. He saw some room for improvement in the original game, too.

“Production seems rushed in places — I’ve had to rework more than just text in some menus,” Hemulen said of the game.

That included alterations to gameplay assets that he thinks weren’t properly tested before release. “For example, a map in the Soviet campaign that is hard to finish because the friendly AI army has too many units and ends up blocking the path to the enemy HQ, making it hard to trigger a win condition,” he said.

He also made major changes to Sakusen File’s “Cenozoic Campaign,” a bonus campaign set far in the past.

Cenozoic Campaign becomes the Colonial Campaign

The Cenozoic Campaign diverges drastically from the setting and tone of the rest of Sakusen File. Hemulen explained:

The developers had originally planned a German Africa campaign, but abandoned it due to time constraints. Looking at the main map, it is clear they repurposed map assets that vaguely resemble the Mediterranean and altered them into a fictional fantasy setting. They discarded the simulated WWII universe entirely and instead wrote a story set in the year 465, in a fantasy world of invented kingdoms, where the player fights figures such as the evil Queen Orizabel and the tyrannical Emperor Efrahim while commanding 20th-century war machines. They called this the “Cenozoic Campaign.” It is unclear why, as “Cenozoic” being the geological age of human life on Earth. After extracting and reviewing the script, I found it rather bland, but still explored whether a faithful localization was possible.
What made faithful localization even less workable was the campaign’s six-branched, multipath
structure. Although the player only experiences eight maps in a run, the game stores a total of 34 maps, each with unique briefings. Which maps appear depends on player choices, meaning the Cenozoic campaign does not contain one story but six different ones. This dramatically increased the storage burden, from eight sets of briefings to 34.

— Hemulen

Hemulen estimated that translating all of the Cenozoic Campaign’s text would require 100,000 characters but he only had 14,000 characters of space left. “Even splitting the campaigns into separate ISOs would not really have solved the problem, because the main burden came from the Cenozoic campaign’s multipath design,” he said.

His solution was to reduce the Cenozoic Campaign to a single, coherent, eight-part story in which all
variations of the same map share one briefing.

In the end, that multipath design is what made the Cenozoic campaign essentially impossible to localize in any meaningful way. I therefore chose to treat the campaign’s map assets, which are actually well made, as assets that needed to be presented differently in order to localize the release as a whole, rather than only the Soviet campaign. I decided to rewrap the Cenozoic assets in a new story that could fit the size limitations and still produce a playable English version. That is how the Colonial Campaign was born: a new script written to fit the existing assets, the broader game universe, and the structural quirks of the campaign. In this sense, I am fully localizing the assets while leaving the original campaign behind.

— Hemulen

Hemulen said he wrote the Colonial Campaign with a clear theme of anti-imperialist struggle. “This choice is uniquely helpful in rewrapping the original assets, but also lets me dive into a field that offers lesser told stories that I have had an interest in for a long time,” he said.

Its story focuses both on events within the contested Polynesian island chain and on how that
regional struggle connects to the wider war still unfolding beyond it. Its perspective is split
between the empire the player serves and the nameless rebels, whose struggle is conveyed
indirectly through a satirical lens.

Hemulen acknowledged that some will feel they are missing out on the original game’s Cenozoic Campaign, but said if they knew what they were missing, they wouldn’t be upset. “Thing is, I have extracted the script and no one who will complain would play it if they got the original script instead, it’s that bad,” he told SHIRO!.

Touching up the original Iron Storm

As Hemulen worked on Sakusen File, he noticed that much of Working Designs’ translation that he was bringing over from Iron Storm had problems. As he was already correcting those problems for Sakusen File, he figured he ought to bring those corrections back to Iron Storm.

“The best way to think about the patch is to imagine a house renovation,” he said. “One does not tear everything down and rebuild from scratch; one assesses each element and systematically repairs it to a chosen standard. The standard I set was to repair the WD translation to the level it should have had, rather than replace it with an entirely new script.”

So while he calls the patch a retranslation, it’s more like a translation fix or repair patch.

Across the game’s 70,000-character main script, Hemulen said he corrected hundreds of misspellings, factual errors and distorted place names, plus rewrote subpar language and grammar. He accomplished it by extracting the script and processing it through several toolchains to compare the original Japanese text with the Working Designs translation and identify divergences and errors.

“One interesting pattern was that the overall quality of the WD translation varied greatly between the three campaigns,” he said. “The American campaign was generally well translated and contained relatively few historical inconsistencies or misrepresentations. The Japanese campaign was much less reliable, and the German campaign was by far the worst, often lacking the feeling of being worked on by an attentive professional translator.”

He had a little help from someone well known to the Saturn scene, too: Bo Bayles, who discovered a hidden cheat menu in Iron Storm that can be activated through the settings menu.

“At my request, he also located the bytes controlling the default settings of said cheat page, which allowed us to repurpose the shoulder buttons and add quick access to options that would otherwise require entering the settings menu,” Hemulen said. “The left trigger now toggles fog of war (sight), and the right toggles the visual hex grid on and off.

Readers can look forward to reading Bo’s findings on the cheat menu in a future edition of Under the Microscope.